Ready for takeoff, readers?
"Airbus will build first US factory in Alabama; A320 jet factory is expected to create 1,000 jobs" by Nicola Clark | New York Times, July 03, 2012
MOBILE, Ala. — Airbus, the European airplane maker, said Monday that it would build its first factory in the United States by investing $600 million over the next five years to build an assembly line here for its popular A320 single-aisle jet....
Alabama officials said the state would provide Airbus with more than $100 million in tax breaks and other incentives to support the project.
Why do I feel let down now?
The A320 plant is expected to create roughly 1,000 new jobs, a figure that includes direct Airbus employees as well as jobs with suppliers.
The expansion was being met with caution by labor unions representing Airbus’s 56,000 employees in Germany, France, Britain, and Spain....
You know, I'm SO SICK of LABOR UNIONS being AGAINST JOBS!!!!
Boeing, for its part, has dismissed claims by Airbus and Alabama officials of the plant’s economic impact, arguing that the numbers of new jobs that will be created ‘‘pale in comparison to the thousands of US jobs destroyed by illegal subsidies’’ Airbus has received from European governments over the past three decades.
Boeing is bitching about government contracts? The chutzpah really is flying high these days!
The United States and the European Union are locked in a trade dispute before the World Trade Organization over accusations of illegal government support to their respective aircraft industries.
I thought we were friends?
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Good thing the jobs are coming:
"Judge closes jail as ‘debtors prison’
COLUMBIANA — A judge has temporarily shut down what he called a debtors prison run by a municipal court.
I was taught and told that s*** went out with Shay's Rebellion over 225 years ago.
In Shelby County Circuit Court, Judge Hub Harrington said that the Harpersville Municipal Court was running a ‘‘judicially sanctioned extortion racket.’’
Aren't they all?
The court repeatedly violated the constitutional rights of defendants that appeared before it, he ruled.
Yeah, Shay's is what made the elite colonialists that wrote the Constitution gather in frightened urgency.
The judge found that if defendants were unable to immediately pay court-imposed fines and fees, they were trapped into paying several times the amount when their cases were turned over to a private probation company."
"Gunman fires at crowd in pub near Univ. of Alabama" by Jay Reeves and Jeff Martin | Associated Press, July 18, 2012
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — A gunman stood outside of a crowded downtown bar and opened fire from two different positions early Tuesday, sending patrons running or crawling for cover in a chaotic and bloody scene. At least 17 people were hurt as bullets ricocheted and glass shards and chunks of brick fell around the nightclub.
Nathan Van Wilkins, 44, surrendered about 10 hours after the 12:30 a.m. shooting near the University of Alabama campus, police said. Authorities believe that he targeted someone during the bar rampage and that it was connected to an earlier shooting at a home.
Related: Alabama Man
Wilkins was also suspected of setting three fires to equipment or property owned by an oil and gas company where he worked.
Police were investigating the possibility the shootings came from a dispute between rival motorcycle gangs. Wilkins’s employer, Capstone Oilfield Services, also had tried to garnish his wages but could not because he declared bankruptcy last year, according to court documents. And the co-owner of the FedEx store where Wilkins turned himself in said the suspect talked about being high on drugs during the shootings.
Outside the Copper Top bar in downtown Tuscaloosa, pools of blood were visible and a trail of bloody footprints marked the sidewalk for about two blocks....
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We literally went from a real high at the beginning of this post to real low.
Also see: Alabama: Bullies and Bankruptcy
Looks like that is all that goes on down there, according to my Boston Globe.
Next Day Update: Witness says Alabama gunman used slur
Of course. Bring race into it now.
